I hate bitcoin because by design it burns resources, polluting the environment, and by design it enables extralegal monetary remittance subject to the laws of no one, no matter how "legitimate" those laws and no matter how well they reflect the will of the governed. The idea of government is fundamental: otherwise, might makes right. Bitcoin makes it impossible to ensure anything like that is happening.
I state all this as my "credentials" for making the statement that theoretically it is not a house of cards. Transactions could take 72 hours to clear. The blockchain could be 1.7 terabytes in size. And transactions could cost hundreds of dollars. None of this would stop bitgold from having a market capitalization in the hundreds of billions. (What could stop it is some technical bugs or mismanagement.)
It is emphatically not a house of cards. (But I don't like it.)
In what way is it a house of cards? It is a legitimately scarce resource being legitimately used exactly as designed.
I'm referring to the gains of Bitcoin, not the currency itself. Bitcoin advocates point to price growth as a sign of stability and use, but I'd posit that much of the growth comes from early use-cases which will likely disappear due to increased regulation (drugs, tax avoidance, escaping capital controls) or the result of fake market conditions (WillyBot, artificial Chinese volume due to bots operating in a zero-fee environment)
I state all this as my "credentials" for making the statement that theoretically it is not a house of cards. Transactions could take 72 hours to clear. The blockchain could be 1.7 terabytes in size. And transactions could cost hundreds of dollars. None of this would stop bitgold from having a market capitalization in the hundreds of billions. (What could stop it is some technical bugs or mismanagement.)
It is emphatically not a house of cards. (But I don't like it.)
In what way is it a house of cards? It is a legitimately scarce resource being legitimately used exactly as designed.